Live for the moment, Marilee.

And if the moment included Rafferty?

Where would it lead them? Scary thing about the road less traveled: you couldn’t always see around the bend.

The hinges of the barn door creaked a protest. Mari jerked around and blinked against the thickening darkness, wondering how long she had been standing there, mulling over the possibility of having an affair with a man she barely knew.

He came toward her slowly, deliberately, his gaze holding hers. And he stepped too close, as he always did. A shiver of awareness skittered over her.

“What’s it gonna be, Mary Lee?” he asked quietly. His eyes were the gray of velvet in the waning light. “Is tonight the night?”

She held herself rigid, afraid if she moved at all, it would be to nod her head. “I’m not ready.”

He bent his head and kissed her, slowly, deeply, intimately. Their lips clung as he pulled back.

“Get ready,” he growled.

He went to his horse, tightened his cinch, and swung up into the saddle, pointing the big gelding toward the trail to the Stars and Bars.

“Hey, Rafferty,” Mari called, uprooting her feet and moving to stand alongside him. “Mind if I come up tomorrow and see what branding is all about?”

Impulse pushed the question out of her. She bit her lip and waited for his answer, her hands jammed deep in the pockets of her jacket, as if she were bracing herself against a stiff wind.

He stared down at her, his face little more than a silhouette in the fading light. “Suit yourself.”

She gave him a lazy, lopsided grin. “I usually do.”

She watched him ride away at a slow jog, feeling a little giddy, a little foolish, a little too pleased that he might allow her to take a peek at his world.

“What the hay, Marilee,” she said, turning back toward the house, moving toward it on shaky legs. “Live for the moment.”

Midnight. The dead of night. The time of ghosts and hunters.

He couldn’t always tell the difference. The images ran together and through each other. The hounds, the corpses, the dog-boys and tigers. They crashed through the woods, making a racket only he could hear. It was as loud as the blasting of an M-16 inside his head, echoing and amplifying off the metal plate. The spotlight exploded before his eyes and behind them.

The blonde was there. He was sure of it. He could hear her laughter and her screams. His head swam and pounded with the sounds and the images. He squeezed his eyes shut and still they came in-through his ears and his fingertips. He felt the tiger ripping open his chest. The blood flowed inward instead of out, and the visions rushed in on the tide and up his throat, choking him.

He cowered behind the contorted body of a white-bark pine, clutching his rifle and weeping like a woman. He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t escape in any way. He was crying too hard to take a shot. Sobbing soundlessly, his mouth torn open as if to scream, but no sound coming out. It all remained within him. The rage, the fear, the madness. And he gripped the rifle and held on. His only anchor to the real world. His only friend in the night.

The blonde laughed. The tiger screamed. The dog-boys did their dirty deeds.

He clutched his rifle and prayed to an empty sky. Please, please, fade to black. Fade to black…

THE MULE eyed her, openly dubious.

“You don’t think I can do this, do you?” Mari said, hefting the western saddle in her arms. It weighed a ton. When her mother had sent her to riding lessons at Baywind Stables, it had been in breeches and boots with a little velvet hunt helmet under her arm. The saddle she strapped on her rented mount was small and light. The mount she strapped it on was petite with a dainty head and kind eyes.

Clyde sized her up and all but laughed at her. His eyes were keen and clear, showing a sharp, cynical intelligence that boded ill. He flicked one long ear back and tossed his big, homely head, rattling the snaps on the cross ties.

Mari adjusted her hold on the saddle and pulled together her nerve. “Think again, rabbit ears. If Lucy could do this, I can damn well do it too.”

It occurred to her that perhaps Lucy hadn’t done this. She may have had her hired hand saddle the animal for her. No matter now. The only hands Mari had were the two on the ends of her arms.

Standing on an old crate, she swung the saddle into place on the mule’s back and adjusted the saddle blanket, tugging it up at his withers. She wrestled with the long latigo strap and fumbled at the unfamiliar task of dealing with the western girth, trying to remember what Rafferty had done the few times she had seen him loosen and tighten his saddle on his big sorrel horse. She nearly gave up once, ready to jump on bareback, but the thought of the uphill trail to the Stars and Bars and the fact that it had been a decade since she had ridden made her renew her efforts to get the saddle tightened down.

Once she had accomplished her task and managed to get the bridle on, she led her noble steed out into the early morning sunshine and mounted with some difficulty and little grace. She took a moment to settle herself, trying to recall without much success how it had felt to be comfortable on the back of a moving animal. Then she pointed the mule toward the trail and they set off at a walk.

Nerves were forgotten almost instantly as they climbed the trail on the wooded hillside. Mari’s surroundings captured her attention almost to the exclusion of the mule. Impressions bombarded her senses-the smell of earth and pine, the delicate shape and movement of aspen leaves, the colors of wildflowers, the songs of birds, the patches of blue that shone through the canopy of branches like bits of stained glass. She breathed it in, soaked it in, taking mental notes and processing them automatically through the creative side of her brain. Fragments of song lyrics floated through her head on phantom melodies.

Clyde plodded onward, oblivious of the creative process but well aware of his rider’s distracted state. He took advantage of Mari’s inattentiveness, nibbling on the leaves of berry bushes as he ambled along. When they reached a clearing, he stopped altogether and dropped his nose down into the fresh clover. Mari started to pull his head up, but the view from the ridge wiped everything else from her mind.

It was spectacular. Simply, utterly spectacular. The ranch lay below them, and below that lay the valley, lush and green like a rumpled velvet coverlet. The stream cut through it, a band of glittering embroidery, shining silver beneath the spring sun. And far beyond the valley the Gallatin range rose up, paragons of strength, huge, silent, their peaks bright with snow.

From a treetop somewhere above her, an eagle took wing, its piercing cry cutting across the fabric of the morning like a razor. The bird glided toward the valley, a dark chevron against the blue sky.

Mari’s breath held fast in her lungs. She had grown up in a city, had traveled to some of the more beautiful sites civilization had to offer, but no place had ever captured her as surely as this place. She sat there, a fine trembling running through her, to the core of her, feeling like an instrument on which someone had struck a perfect note. It vibrated in the heart of her, touched the very center of her, and tears rose in her eyes because she knew just how rare a moment like this was. She felt as if she had been waiting for it her entire life. Waiting to feel that sense of belonging, that sense of finally sliding into place after so many years of not fitting in.

It frightened her a little to feel it now. She had no way of knowing how long it would last, didn’t know if she should grab on to it with both hands and hang on or let it pass. She thought of Rafferty and his aversion to outsiders. She wasn’t from here, had come only on hiatus from the rest of her life. Just passing through. Just passing time. But time stood absolutely still as she looked out over the valley and to the mountains beyond.